Curriculum-Based Measurement Analysis

Introduction

The struggle of several students in order to achieve their educational goals, created the need for new, simple educational practices which would enable teachers to test and evaluate the students’ performance. Therefore, Deno (1985) introduced the Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) system which screens students’ performance, evaluates their progress and identifies those being at risk of failing. It is argued that CBM provides accurate information on the students’ performance (Shinn, 1989). Furthermore, it is considered an efficient method for academic assessment beacuse it enables teachers to make important decisions and an efficient tool for assessing English language learners’ reading skills (Wiley & Deno, 2005), which is very

The CBM-Maze method is widely accepted as a reliable and valid way of measuring progress in reading (Parker , Hasbrouck, & Tindal, 1992Fuchs and Fuchs (1990) used five different criteria in order to form maze passages used in a computer-based system that had as purpose to help teachers administer, score and design graphs of CBM measures. Firstly, distractοrs’ length had to be within one letter difference from the correct words’ length,. Secondly, if the seventh word that had to be deleted was an article or a proper noun the next appropriate word was deleted instead. Thirdly, distractοrs input in the text would make its context incomprehensible and they were not allowed to rhyme, to sound or to look like the correct choice. Fourth, the distractοrs should not be words without meaning or extracted from a vocabulary level too high for the students to understand. Finally, 1.5 lines ahead in the text should be the most that the reader should read in order to exclude the distracter as a possible correct choice. Several studies ( including the current study) adopted the above mentioned rules for their CBM-Mazes construction (e.g., Espin et al., 2010; Johnson et al., 2013; Tichá et al., 2009; Torgesen, Nettle, Howard, & Winterbottom,

Methods for selecting distractors have differed across studies. In most studies, claim distractors are selected that so that there is clearly on correct answer, and so that students can select a word without reading more than 1.5 lines ahead in the text(Espin,Wallace, Lembke, Campbell, & Long, 2010). However, Parker et al., (1992) proposed that by including difficult distractors, deeper text comprehension is achieved . previous studies including unchallenging distractors failed to identify students’ reading level (Bean & Brandt, 1981; Pedigo & DeSanti, 1986; Pikulski & Pikulski, 1977). More recently, Ketterlin-Geller, McCoy, Twyman, and Tindal (2006) have suggesting that making the reading process more demanding by using contextual meaningful distractors, reasonably stated in terms of grammar and syntax, would lead to higher levels of reading comprehension, when answering CBM-Mazes.

In a recent study, Conoyer …… examined the effects of different methods for selecting distractor items on the reliability and validity of the maze scores as indicators of general reading performance. They found that